The outdoor event Tempe Jam on Friday, October 21 is first and foremost a concert, with performances from local favorites Banana Gun, Paper Foxes and The Stakes
But you might want to stay in your seat between sets, because that’s when The Sacred G take the stage.
The Sacred G’s are a local dance troupe that lights up events across the country with their fluid yet powerful gesticulations, filled with hundreds of mini LED lights. In one of their performances, the dancers wear faceless outfits in an all-black ensemble, adorned with over 100 LED lights for each dancer.
The use of LED lights in dance began when ravers in the late 90s brought them to underground events. “Rave culture took the style and adapted it to putting lights on our fingers and creating like illusions,” says Orbit, a band member. “We use light to guide style, including tap dancing, a sub-genre of different dance styles.”
At their shows, The Sacred G’s groove to robot-like synchronized dance moves. Some of the crew occasionally fall out of synchronicity second by second, then twist and turn feverishly on their hands, defying gravity.
“We’re all street dancers,” explains Vo Vera, one of the founders of The Sacred G. “We come from the underground hip-hop community, and there’s such an umbrella in the hip-hop community where we all come from crews different, different walks of life and we all have different styles in which we are trained.”
On October 21, in addition to the LED costumes, some of the group will wear mesh costumes. “We’re going to use them for the beginning of the piece to tell a story, a thematic piece,” Vo Vera explains, “which is about the collective consciousness being divided into souls spinning around in human form. And then these spirits in human form interact with the aliens, who will be the LED dancers. So we’ll be performing a mix of street dance styles with LED and mesh costumes.”
Vo Vera (second dancer from left): “These spirits in human form interact with the aliens, who will be the LED dancers.”
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“And we have poppers, animators and tutters,” continues Vo Vera, which are three types of street dance and some would argue are subgenres of breakdancing that date back to the 70s and 80s. Popping is where dancers pop their body parts by relaxing and then contracting the body muscles so that the body or body parts “pop” or “pop”. Animators, as they sound, portray a character in a kind of dance movement – a robot is a popular character popular from pre-Thriller Michael Jackson. The Tutters, derived from the “King Tut” era, are dancers who imitate old Egyptian drawings. Dancers imitate the portrayed characters’ hands which are pointed in specific directions, usually at 90 degree angles, then when the dancers move the hands in another direction, the arms and rest of the body follow the direction of the pointed “tut” hands. .
“And there’s a little bit of house dancing,” Vo Vera says, which are heel-and-step jack dance moves, “and overhead swings,” two-legged, breaking pre-jumps done before going down to the floor.
Sacred G’s are booked in the US for their novel approach to introducing LEDs into multimedia presentations. This includes their street and club dance styles, along with other elements of their hip-hop base – street art and muralism, rapping or MCing, and adding great poetic lines, leadership tones, words of speaking, DJing and music production.
“We have more work on our LED suits overseas,” says Vo Vera. “I don’t think there’s a lot of people doing this hybrid technology of LED clothing and street dance, especially not with our kind of costumes – ours are custom and fully programmable where the costumes are programmed to music.”
Tempe Jam starts at 7pm tonight, Friday, October 21, at the Tempe Sports Complex, 8401 South Hardy Drive, and is free to attend. And if you can’t make it, The Sacred G’s next concert will be at ExperiMeant It! 1.1, an “open styles dance battle and platform,” according to the event page, from noon to 6 p.m. at the Galvin Playhouse on ASU’s Tempe campus.
